I think you probably do what I do, in two different ways. On the one hand, when I read words by people I’ve never heard speak, I hear their voices in an accent close to mine most of the time. Ironically, such people might never be able to do the accent I hear their voices in convincingly. In that sense, I think you probably speak like me when I read your words. I also think you probably do this too, when you read my words if you’ve never heard me. If you’re in the States, for example, you might hear my words in an accent I couldn’t convincingly imitate. Maybe not. Perhaps you realise I’m from Southeast England and therefore have a certain kind of accent which might be reflected in the words and spellings I use, although actually that’s not always so. For instance, at least in my childhood I said “couch” for sofa and “lounge” for living room. My mother actually used to say “mad” for angry. I’m aware that the first two are some kind of aspirational thing in that the cognoscenti say the latter and hoi polloi the former, but I’m not sure they come from there. For all I know they may not be American as such but be regional in Britain somewhere, probably the Thames Valley or the Medway towns.
When I was a child, my accent may or may not have been afflicted by speech impediments, in that my pronunciation of certain sounds differed from RP in a way which I suspect others’ didn’t. Specifically, I used a velar semivowel rather than a voiced palatal one for the sound expressed by consonantal Y and a labiodental semivowel for the sound expressed by R. My short E was also more open than it is now and in particular my pronunciation of long I was “oi”. I want to use IPA here but I worry that I’ll leave people baffled. The vowel differences are probably to do with accent at the time, and the drift short E has undergone is probably a general thing. Something I never did but children around me did do was pronounce the voiceless palatal semivowel as “fy”, which I think is quite common, and in fact someone close to me had that addressed by a speech therapist. I recently discovered that the Guarani language uses both velar and labiodental semivowels, so maybe I’d have a good Guarani accent.
Present in my father’s accent right up to the end of his life was TH-fronting: saying “th” as F and V. This is widely associated with the Cockney accent. He also did something which is widely associated with a working class Southeastern English accent: he used an intervocalic glottal stop for T. This particular sound fascinates me. In particular, it’s remarkable that a sound pronounced just behind the teeth should somehow slip all the way to the throat, although almost the reverse happened when the sound written as “GH” turned into an F. Something similar also seems to have happened in Gaidhlig, and it seems in Scottish English and Scots around here, where the TH, far from being fronted, has become an aitch sound.
I’m sorry, I can’t do this because it feels so sloppy. Here’s a chart of the IPA:
Okay, so that’s messy but this is what I’m talking about and I’m not going to fool around with spelling pronunciation vaguenesses any more. The situation is this. I used to say /ɰ/ when other people said /j/ and /ʋ/ when other people had /ɹ/. The latter’s quite common in Southeast England and I’ve also heard it from a Cornish person, but as far as I can tell, the former was just me. The Cockney accent is known for changing /θ/ to /f/ and /ð/ to /v/, and also famous for using /ʔ/ for /VtV/. With me?
Right, so the presence of the intervocalic glottal stop tends to get written as an apostrophe even when transcribing other languages. In English it occurs in Southeast England northward to the former Bedfordshire and also in Scottish English, and while I’m at it, isn’t it weird how both Scottish English and Southeastern English English use /ʌ/? I recently realised that the Gaidhlig GH and DH between back vowels, i.e. the broad allophone, is also a glottal stop in some accents. In other words, the eastern isles of this archipelago are sporadically spotted therewith.
Common use of the glottal stop in that position in English is stereotypically associated with poverty, a low degree of formal institutional education, social deprivation and possibly being White. It’s also associated with Southern England but apparently it’s also used elsewhere nowadays due to the influence of ‘Eastenders’. It comes quite naturally to me to use glottal stops but I’m thoroughly middle class though also exceedingly White. Its history is that my father did it, although I probably didn’t learn to speak much from him, then I did it to fit in at school, so in fact I’m diglossic. However, my paternal grandfather was from the Gorbals, which makes me wonder if his probable glottal stops, and for that matter unrounded short U’s, are actually in an unbroken line from his accent to mine. This probably doesn’t exist, but it reminds me of Hume’s view of cause and effect, that there is no sense in which a cause produces an effect and there’s nothing more than constant conjunction, temporal precedence and contiguity to cause. This is a weird way of thinking about causation to be sure, and not one I accept, but it might reflect my family phonology.
However, I’m not here to talk about myself except as an example of someone who has been known to produce intervocalic glottal stops. My concern is something else, and something on which I’ve recently come to ponder: the hard left glottal stop. A similar phenomenon occurs with aitch-dropping, but not to lose focus, there seems to be a tendency for SWP and other Trotskyist activists to use intervocalic glottal stops to a greater extent than in the general population. I’ve no idea if any research has been done into this but until the other day I’d generally thought that it was an affectation to make the speaker seem more stereotypically working class. A genuine example of a very similar phenomenon was of a member of the RCP who referred to a comrade as “‘Olly” when her name was Holly. This led me to think they were referring to someone called Oliver. I now think this accent was genuinely affected and specifically directed at me as someone they perceived as bourgeois with a near-RP accent, which was the case at the time, so it’s akin either to inverse snobbery or as a tactic to unsettle me. Little did they know that I was actually diglossic, and they were failing to fake an accent authentically. They were attempting to reproduce a West Yorkshire or Nottinghamshire accent unsuccessfully, because I may be wrong but I don’t think those accents drop aitches at all. Consequently I perceived them as referring to someone called Oliver.
I have a hunch, then, that the accent was fake and adopted for tactical purposes, but I’ve just changed my mind, or rather have acquired doubts, about the fakeness of intervocalic glottal stops in Socialist Worker activists. Owen Jones recently posted a video from the Your Party conference where he interviewed a member of the SWP whose accent as presented definitely did include glottal stops, so my kneejerk reaction was “fake”, but I no longer think this is true. I think something else is going on. Thomas Pynchon once referred to an American military accent as “Southern” and then withdrew that claim as a sign of his lack of experience. He later concluded, and I tend to agree with him, that the US Army accent sounds Southern to Northerners and Northern to Southerners. In other words, there’s a specific US Army accent which kind of averages out the accents of its soldiers. I further suspect this accent confers a sense of cohesion, like the uniform, rituals and general camaraderie of the military, such as it is. Moreover, maybe people adopt this accent in an attempt to fit in and it later becomes second nature to them, the same process, in fact, that I went through when I was at secondary school. It would be hypocritical of me to condemn this process.
It’s just possible, then, that the SWP glottal stop deserves a bit more sympathy than I’ve previously afforded it, because it just may be a kind of institutional accent, conferring membership and emerging without conscious intervention. It might actually not be fake at all much of the time, and when it is, it’s about wanting to fit in to the in-group and oriented in that direction rather than outwards.
The other anecdotal datum from all this is What Sarada Did. Sarada has a near-RP accent and lives in Scotland with me. Previously she lived in the English Midlands, but she’s from West London. A few years ago, she went to a political meeting in London and I saw a video of her in which she used glottal stops. She didn’t seem conscious of this and I think it’s simple unconscious influence from either others around her or being in Central London. If this is so, maybe it’s not fair to blame Trotskyists for talking this way either. It seems she used to use it at school and when talking to her friends. As for our children, one of them has an accent closest to Liz’s and the other’s used to be like mine but is now more Yorkshire.
Glottal stops in English, or at least English English, have historically been frowned upon, but in other languages they’re considered entirely respectable sounds in the standard language. This is true of Arabic, Maltese, Hebrew, Hawaiian and Samoan for example. In Germanic languages other than the ones spoken here or derived from them, glottal stops begin words which are written with initial vowels. I once said to my ex’s mother “Das ist ein Problem” and she thought I’d said “Das ist Dein Problem”. Danish uses something like a glottal stop which they call “stød” where Norwegian and Swedish use tone to distinguish otherwise identical words, although apparently not all Danish does this and it can be a creaky voice instead. The Austronesian languages Hawaiian and Samoan both use glottal stops and Hawaiian in particular is very focussed on having a letter for it, which they call ʻokina – “ʻ”. I have to admit that I don’t really understand their insistence on it in this manner. It’s considered the final letter in the alphabet and affects alphabetisation, but at the start of a word the following vowel is capitalised. The Samoan apostrophe was temporarily dropped in the 1960s CE, then adopted again in 2012, and likewise is considered the last letter in the alphabet. My perception of the Cockney or Scottish English glottal stop is that it’s a written letter which has identical capital and lower case forms and I suppose I’d alphabetise it as if it were a T. Hebrew and Arabic both kind of have the glottal stop, represented as aleph in Hebrew and in a more complicated manner in Arabic, where it’s called “hamza”, as the first letter of the alphabet. Our own letter A is descended from the glottal stop letter. Maltese uses a Q. All of these are fully-fledged letters.
Scots politicises the apostrophe. Words written with apostrophes as if they have missing letters compared to English words only had those introduced in the eighteenth century, and are often non-etymological and they’re therefore deprecated. But not all of them, because some do actually represent missing letters. It’s been referred to as the “apologetic apostrophe”. The glottal stop in Scots is simply represented as a T.
I could say a lot more, and often do, but that’s all I’ve got for you for now, except to say that there can be more than one way to politicise both the glottal stop and the apostrophe. Maybe Cockneys should start proudly using the ʻokina, and maybe Scots could distinguish between the relatively few legitimate apostrophes and their allophone of /t/ by doing the same.
In Northeastern Niger, now deep in the desert, there is a life-size rock carving of two giraffes, the largest piece of rock art in the world. Dating from Neolithic times, they and many other carvings strongly suggest that the Sahara region at the time was not a desert at all, but more like the Serengeti. There are many other carvings throughout the Sahara of bovids, including a genus called Pelorovis. Later rock art includes drawings of horses and chariots. All of this indicates that quite recently, perhaps into historical times, the Sahara was not a desert. This is the Sahara Pump Hypothesis, and is considered important to a number of aspects of human history.
The vast desert that now exists all across North Afrika would seem to present a considerable barrier to the exit of humans from the continent. Controversially, we may have evolved on an island in the Gulf of Aden, spread into the Horn of Afrika southward. The earliest known representatives of the genus Homo known date from Ethiopia 2.8 million years ago. Homo habilis is found in East and South Afrika from about 2.3 million years ago although they may not be directly ancestral to us. Homo erectus, on the other hand, is found not only in Afrika but also all the way across Eurasia, including “Java Man”, found in 1891, and “Peking Man”, in 1926. These people must have managed to get out of Afrika somehow. It’s been suggested that they did it by moving along the Nile Valley, but if the whole of North Afrika fluctuated between desert and more humid conditions, their movement is not so unusual. After all, if there used to be giraffes and other typical savannah fauna in the Sahara, why should that not include humans? Moreover, considering that there used to be hippos in the Thames, isn’t it likely that they would’ve got there because there wasn’t a desert in the way?
I feel quite strongly that White people tend to use the Sahara Desert as a way of marking off the more southerly portion of the continent as a kind of “Darkest Africa” (with a C of course) where all the Black people come from. Perhaps we like to imagine there’s always been a line in the sand, as it were, between us and the majority of human genetic diversity found south of it, a view which the Tuareg, for example, do not consider significant. I can’t speak for the Tuareg of course, but those who live in Mali compared to those who live in Libya are considerably darker-skinned but all of them consider themselves as part of the same ethnicity, because they are. However, this is not the main focus of my post today.
The Sahara Pump Hypothesis is generally known as the Sahara Pump Theory, and whereas it certainly rings true to me it is apparently not currently considered rigorous enough to be regarded as one. This raises the Kuhnian view of scientific change in my mind. Thomas Kuhn claimed that the social dynamics of academia were the most significant factor in the acceptance and rejection of theories, so that it was only when the younger people who came up with new theories reached positions of influence that their theories became accepted by the discipline concerned. There may also be other factors. I, for example, believe hominins had an amphibious phase, living in or near beaches, hence my belief that we may have evolved in the Gulf of Aden, which is Elaine Morgan’s belief, not widely accepted by palæontologists, possibly because its emphasis includes the evolution of women rather than focussing solely on men. Hence “Sahara Pump Hypothesis“, even though to an outsider it looks pretty convincing.
There are said to have been a number of phases. The earliest was in the Plio-Pleistocene, a concept used in palæoanthropology to demarcate a period between about five million to twelve thousand years ago which focusses on the evolution and ecology of large vertebrates and the cooling trend which marks this stretch of time, even though it doesn’t work well for more broadly-based palæontology. As far as hominins are concerned, however, there is no firm shift in our history with the onset of the Pleistocene more significant than other events in our story. There are two phases considered here. The first is around 3.2 million years ago, and the other a two hundred millennium period starting about half a million years later. Both of these are well before the start of the current cycle of ice ages and interglacials. One event that happened at this time was that goats spread from Afrika into Eurasia. Another primate than humans, the macaques, also increased their range around then. Geladas, on the other hand, found their range reduced.
Later on there were two waves of Homo erectus migration. The first got all the way to the Far East but the second only reached as far as South Asia. This can be determined by the kind of tools used at the time. There are also signs in the caves, where the likes of stalagmites and stalactites grew during certain periods and halted at others, because water wasn’t entering the systems. Later on, Homo heidelbergensis also managed to spread out of Afrika, and finally Homo sapiens, followed by three more events, one associated with the 8.2 kiloyear event which I’m planning to cover in more detail below, another with the 5.9 kiloyear event and the most recent with the Late Bronze Age Collapse and ensuing Dark Age.
Ice ages generally increase the sizes of hot deserts because a lot of water is locked up in the ice. Consequently, in general during the last few ice ages the Sahara has been both a desert and larger than it is now. The immediate cause of the shrinkage of the desert is increase in the strength of the monsoons in West Afrika, which leads to more water arriving from both the Mediterranean and the Atlantic off the western coast of the Sahara. This is driven by the gradual shifts in the orientation of this planet’s orbit such that we end up closest to the Sun in different seasons. Currently, the Northern summer is when we’re furthest from the Sun, but that very gradually shifts and when the perihelion is in the summer, this triggers more evaporation from the North Atlantic and higher rainfall. Another factor is that the doldrums, the belts of latitude where there is little wind, shift away from the Equator due to warmer temperate regions and this pushes the monsoon region north in the Northern Hemisphere. There are many other factors.
The sea bed off the West Afrikan coast is currently rich in dust from the Sahara and also preserves pollen. Samples at various depths below that sea bed show fluctuations in the levels of dust and pollen types. When there is less dust, there’s also less Ephedra pollen, which prefers drier conditions and more sedge and grass pollen, which need more rain, and this reverses when there’s more. There have in fact been two hundred and thirty periods over the past eight million years when the Sahara was more humid, although when you get to that time scale continental drift becomes significant and Afrika as a whole was in a different position. When there’s more vegetation in the Sahara, it holds on to more water and also reduces the amount of sunlight reflected compared to sand or bare rock, so there’s a feedback effect. In the Sahara during these periods, there were larger lakes and/or more wetlands. These lakes were also linked by a more extensive river network and the rivers which are still there would have carried more water, particularly the Nile and the Niger. The shorelines of these lakes, and in one case, Lake Tchad, a sea, can be plotted using the contours of the land, and are further supported by the presence of rock art only above these levels, piles of fish bones and also the prevalence of fish hooks. Lake Tchad, sometimes referred to today in that prehistoric state as Megalake Chad, had an estimated area of 340 000 square kilometres and a depth of up to a hundred and sixty metres, which is about the size of the Caspian Sea. Other “megalakes” included the Megafezzan, Ahnet and, just barely cut off from the Mediterranean, the Chotta. This last has an interesting history as there was once a French plan to reflood the area by digging a canal from the sea to the basin. The Romans undertook an expedition in search of spices to the Tchad, where they encountered hippopotami. Also in these lakes were turtles, Nile perch and crocodiles. The presence of the rivers would also have eased movement into and out of the area. Just outside Afrika was the famed “Arabia Felix”, the south of the Arabian peninsula which is now uncontroversially desert but back then was perceived by the Romans as a fertile and lush environment where many spices originated. Although this is in the realm of “travellers’ tales”, there certainly would’ve been a time when the Arabian peninsula was like this.
The words for “hippo” in widely separated North Afrikan languages tend to be similar. In Aiki, spoken in Tchad, the word is bùngùr, in Songhoyboro Ciine, spoken in Niger, it’s bàŋà, and in the Nara language of Eritrea it’s àbà. That doesn’t sound that close to me, but there is also a theory which seeks to explain the distribution of the Afro-Asiatic languages in terms of the Sahara Pump. The current spread of these languages looks like this:
Hearing the word “Afro-Asiatic” may make them sound rather more obscure to Europeans than they in fact are. These are in fact what used to be called the Hamitic-Semitic-Kushitic language family, and includes the liturgical languages Ge`ez and Coptic as well as Hebrew, Arabic, Maltese and the Berber tongues, as well as Amharic, an important language of Ethiopia, the significant Hausa language of West Afrika, and Ancient Egyptian. There are 350 surviving Afro-Asiatic languages, spoken by a total of five hundred million people, Arabic being of course the most successful. Usually, when an attempt is made to reconstruct a parental language from a language family, such as Indo-European, it seems to date to some time in the Bronze Age. Not Afro-Asiatic though, I presume partly due to the fact that Ancient Egyptian is so, well, ancient, being over 5 500 years old. The other written language recorded at this time, Sumerian, and also the slightly more recent Elamite, are difficult or impossible to relate to any other known languages because they’re so ancient the chances are their relatives are all long-since extinct. By contrast, Proto-Afro-Asiatic may have been spoken between 18 000 and 12 000 years ago, which is pre-Neolithic, probably in Northeastern Afrika.
These languages occupy a special place in linguistics. Because of Biblical literalism and the importance of the Abrahamic faiths, Europeans used to believe that all languages were descended from Hebrew. After all, if you take Genesis literally, all of the speech quoted in it, including what Eve and Adam said, is in Hebrew, and if the Bible is literally true that implies that the first language was Hebrew. Also, the vast majority of modern scripts derives from Phœnician, even including the South and Southeast Asian ones, some exceptions being the Far Eastern, West Afrikan and Native American forms of writing, so these are the people who invented writing and their languages were some of the first to be written. Hebrew, Arabic, Coptic and Ge`ez are also liturgical, so are considered special within their faith communities.
The period during which Proto-Afro-Asiatic was spoken is pre-Holocene and during one of the more humid Saharan ages. There are a number of theories about where it originated, including one popular among Egyptologists that it was along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. This of course places it outside of Afrika already, and therefore presumes that it spread into the continent. It’s associated with the idea that languages spread with agriculture. The idea that it originated in the Horn of Afrika is based on the greater diversity found there, since more diverse languages tend to be found near their origins. An English example is the wide range of English accents found in this country in a relatively small area compared to the relative uniformity of North America and Australasia. The other two theories, which could involve the Sahara Pump Hypothesis, are that it originated in North Afrika and that it started in the southern Sahara and northern Sahel. DNA evidence among speakers of these languages suggests either the Horn of Afrika followed by an early spread into Asia followed by a return to the original region from Arabia, or the Middle East, the problem there being that the DNA in question arose by mutation after the spread had already happened. Also, linguistic and genetic histories can be completely different. One of the subgroups, though, is very high in both Tchad and Semitic language speakers, over ninety percent in fact, suggesting that both have an intermediate origin, perhaps over a very wide area of North Afrika, also known as the Sahara!
Hence I prefer to think of the origin of the Afro-Asiatic languages to be somewhere in the Green Sahara in the late Palæolithic. Whereas I don’t want to set too much store in the idea that ancient mythologies are inerrantly reliable sources, the Tanakh puts the origin of the whole human race in the Garden of Eden in Western Asia. If this is related to the idea of an Afro-Asiatic homeland it could mean that the Levantine theory is the correct one. However, if it isn’t, it kind of means that the Garden of Eden might in fact be the Sahara in a more humid phase, and that the stories told in Genesis relate to this area. Is it possible that the perception that land would become more hostile to growing crops because of what Christians think of as the Fall is actually due to the increasing harshness of the climate in that region. However, the clemency of the climate probably shouldn’t be overstressed since it still wasn’t exactly like France or some other “perfect” location. Placing the original land in North Afrika would also mean there was a movement of the people similar to the Exodus, but at a much earlier date which had nothing to do with the Ancient Egyptians.
The Afro-Asiatic languages as a group are largely uncontroversial except for the Omotic languages, which may not be related but simply have borrowed a lot of features from nearby languages which were genuinely Afro-Asiatic. These are written in the Ge`ez script like Amharic, or sometimes Latin, and are found in Ethiopia. They’re agglutinative – they inflect by adding separate morphemes to the stem – and also tonal, like most Afrikan languages spoken south of the Sahara. They’re the least like the other members of the family, and share vocabulary related to honey but not to bovids (“unto a land flowing with milk and honey” – “אֶל-אֶרֶץ זָבַת חָלָב וּדְבָשׁ”), suggesting that any split which may have occurred preceded pastoralism. If they are related, they’re closest to Cushitic, which is of course the group spoken in Kush, as mentioned in the Tanakh.
Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic and Maltese are all clearly closely related to each other, as anyone with a smattering of any of them can tell. Maltese is unusual as a Semitic language spoken in Europe today, and used to have a wider range as Siculo-Arabic, spoken in Sicily until the thirteenth Christian century. Uniquely for a Semitic language, it’s written using Latin script and has borrowed a lot of Italian vocabulary, but is still thoroughly Semitic in grammar. As well as being spoken all across the Maghreb and into the Middle East and being used as a liturgical and technical language over an even wider region, Arabic was, as I’m sure you know, spoken in Iberia and Arabic words have even made their way into French as a result. The importance of Arabic cannot be overestimated. Hebrew is of course the language of the Bible and Israel, and I’ve talked about it copiously elsewhere. Aramaic is still spoken as well, and is also used here and there in the Bible. It was the language of Jesus and its script was adopted all across Asia, even forming the basis of the cursive Mongolian script. It’s still spoken today and has an uninterrupted history of three millennia.
The Berber languages are spoken in the Sahara and have their own script, called Tamazight, which I learned a couple of years ago and used to write a long plan I mentioned which I didn’t want anyone else to read at the time. Berber language and culture has been adversely affected by Arab hegemony in the Maghreb because the countries involved pursued Arabisation on independence from France, not enabling the Berbers to have much influence. As can be seen from the map, whereas the Berber-speaking communities in the northeast of the continent are fairly scattered, they form a pretty continuous area over most of Mali, much of southern Algeria and some of Niger.
The Berber language Tawellemmet, the largest Tuareg language, is spoken in Mali, Niger and northern Nigeria, and overlaps in territory with the not very closely related Hausa. Hausa is important. It’s a Chadic language spoken by a total of 75 million people, often as a second language, and due to the rapid growth in the population of Nigeria this is likely to be a considerable underestimate. It’s used as an auxiliary language in the country. It’s spoken in northern Nigeria, southern Niger, Tchad, Ghana and Cameroun. Some of Hausa is tonal, some not, depending on the dialect. Nowadays Hausa is written in Latin script although it previously used Arabic, like many other Afrikan languages such as Kiswahili and even Afrikaans. It also has at least three other scripts. It has implosive as well as plosive consonants, pronounced with an influx of air rather than an egress from the lungs. There are a couple of dozen ways to pluralise nouns.
Related closely to Hausa are the other Chadic languages, spoken of course in Tchad but also Nigeria, the Central African Republic and Cameroun. There are about a gross of these, whose speakers are thought to be descended from the people who dwelt on the shores of Lake Tchad when it was a sea in the mid-Holocene seven thousand years ago. Although Hausa is by far the most widely spoken, another eight languages have at least 200 000 speakers, which is more than Gàidhlig by far. They’re all tonal and lack consonant clusters, and suffix agglutinatively. Ngas is the second most widely-spoken Chadic language, found on the Jos Plateau in Nigeria.
The southernmost Afro-Asiatic languages are the Kushitic ones spoken in the Rift Valley in Tanzania, including Iraqw which is currently expanding through absorbing nearby groups. Along this southern border of the family’s native area there are many Niger-Congo languages spoken too, which don’t mix with the Afro-Asiatic ones. For instance, in the Jos Plateau, there is a language completely surrounded by Ngas which is not under threat.
It would be a bit of an omission not to mention Ancient Egyptian. This is not entirely extinct because of being adopted by the Coptic church early in the Christian Era. By this point it was written in a modified Greek alphabet with a line over some letters for a certain vowel and the use of several demotic characters to represent sounds not in Greek. It must surely be the oldest surviving language in the world, being at least five and a half thousand years old. Very early on, it adopted signs standing for individual sounds in its hieroglyphics, although a wide range of different signs were used representing several consonants together, whole concepts, gender and status. The number of signs used actually increased as time went by and as technology changed the appearance of signs standing for tools also altered to make them more like the contemporary instruments. Although like most other Semitic languages Egyptian didn’t write vowels, some of them can be worked out from the fact that Coptic, using as it does the Greek alphabet, does. Hieroglyphics became hieratics when written on papyrus and were slightly more sketchy, and eventually the cursive demotic, which is basically a handwritten script like many others but retaining many of the conceptual features of hieroglyphics. Ancient Egyptian and Coptic have a lot in common with other Semitic and Afro-Asiatic languages.
Although you wouldn’t be able to tell from Coptic, Arabic or Hebrew, most Afro-Asiatic languages are tonal. Their scripts tend to relegate vowels to a secondary importance relative to consonants, which reflects the fact that they use a “root and pattern” system, where the consonants carry the basic meaning of the words and the vowels inflect it. This happens with English strong verbs and mutation plurals so it isn’t as foreign as might at first appear. They usually have two genders, feminine and masculine, which include human beings, and the genders of each noun tend to remain the same in most of the languages. They also usually distinguish gender in second person pronouns as well as third, though not in first. One of the mysterious things about them is that they share many grammatical features with today’s Celtic languages, which are completely unrelated, and nobody knows why.
I realise I’ve gone off on one regarding language here, but to finish I want to return to the basic thought that the Sahara is not always a desert. If human influence on the climate is sufficiently weak, at some time, probably about thirteen millennia from now, the Sahara will once again cease to be a desert for thousands of years, the megalakes and river network will return and vegetation will once again cover the region. During the Roman period, the focus and concept of Europe was in some ways subservient to the idea of a Mediterranean region which consisted of that sea and its hinterland. This also erodes the concept of Afrika as a separate set of regions, and removes the geographical barrier which White Europeans are so keen on as a way of separating the “Blacks” from the “Whites”. It’s a mere accident of time and geography that we happen to be living at this point where they are separate. Not only is it thought that darker-skinned people than currently inhabit the region lived all the way up to the Mediterranean, including Ancient Egypt to some extent, but the Western Hunter-Gatherer population was not fair-skinned and nor were Caucasians in general up until a few thousand years ago. The presence of hippos in the Thames and straight-tusked elephants in the Thames Valley brings home the point that Europe, Britain included, and Afrika are geographically continuous, and if they were connected back then, how much more connected are they in this age of globalism?
Yesterday‘s post was on the question of whether the English version of the Latin alphabet would look odd to someone who couldn’t read English. In other words, to see ourselves as others see us. Today’s is about scripts more widely, particularly those of West Afrika and South Asia, but elsewhere as well.
The geographic and population-related distribution of different scripts is very uneven. In terms of number of written languages, Latin is obviously the most widely-used script. I’m guessing that that’s also true in terms of population. Fifteen hundred million people speak the twelve most commonly spoken languages written in Latin script. This is, I’m guessing, followed by Chinese, which as well as being used on its own to write Chinese “dialects” (actually languages), also gets used to write Japanese in part and has historically used to write many other languages. After that is probably Arabic script, which is actually used in China too, followed by Cyrillic, at least in terms of number of languages, and then probably Devanagari, the script used to write Hindi. After that, Hebrew square script is used to write several languages, though Hebrew itself dominates there, and historically Greek has been used for Greek, Coptic and Gothic and is also ancestral to Latin and Cyrillic. After that, I’m not aware of scripts which are widely used. Hangul, the Korean script, is also used to write the Austronesian language Cia-Cia, and has also been used for Hokkien in Taiwan. That said, it seems that the majority of remaining scripts, of which there are many, are each associated with a single language.
There’s a lot of politics in script choice, and Arabic in particular, which works excellently for the Arabic language itself and also for other Semitic tongues and those which have borrowed lots of Semitic words, is often applied to languages for which it’s unsuitable. The distinctive feature of Semitic, and possibly other Afro-Asiatic, languages is that they have roots based on three consonants which are then modified grammatically by vowels, and sometimes by other consonants. Hence salaam – peace, islam – surrender, muslim – person who has surrendered, for example. The closely related Hebrew language does the same thing. There is an issue with how Arabic script is read, because studies have shown that readers take longer to read each letter than they do with Latin because the shapes are simple and often distinguished using dots above or below them. The official adoption of Arabic script is often a political statement.
In the former Soviet Union, Cyrillic was used in most places, the exceptions being the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in the Far East of the country and the Baltic and Caucasian states. There seems to have been a deliberate policy to introduce differences in the scripts for neighbouring Turkic-speaking nations in particular in order to prevent communication between them. One which particularly sticks in my mind actually used an ampersand for a particular vowel. Mongolian is also officially written in Cyrillic although it used a number of other scripts including the vertical traditional script and another non-cursive vertical script, and ‘Phags Pa, as is also used to write Tibetan. The fact that Cyrillic is used to write such diverse languages means that in theory it could be used for a huge range of tongues which have never been written in Cyrillic, and this brings me to one particular idéefixée of mine, that the Q-Celtic languages should be written using Cyrillic because like Russian and other Slavic languages they have palatised and non-palatised versions of many of their consonants, and it works better than what is done at the moment for any of them. Unfortunately, if you look at place names in Ireland, for example, written in Cyrillic, they just seem to be transliterations of the English versions of those words.
The Americas have their own systems of writing even though Latin scripts dominate, and they really fall into two categories historically. One is the pre-Columbian writing systems used by the Mayans and Aztecs, with an honourable mention for the quipu system of knotted threads used by the Inca. Runes have also been used by Nordic people in North America in the first Christian millennium. There may be others but I’m not aware of them. These are not used much today, although they are in some very limited situations such as on flags and in commercial logos. For instance, the Mexican flag includes a glyph from the Nahuatl script.
The other category constitutes scripts which were consciously invented to represent languages and include Cree syllabics, used for instance to write Inuktitut, Ojibwe and Cree, and the remarkable Cherokee syllabary invented by Sequoyah, an up until that point illiterate native American, which reminds me of clichéed old Western “WANTED” posters but is a valid script in itself. I assume it looks that way because of the kind of font which was popular at the time.
There appears to be a connection between the Cherokee syllabary and the Vai one, shown above. Vai is spoken in Liberia and Sierra Leone, and these two countries have particular histories which may be relevant. Liberia was set up as the goal of the “Back To Africa” movement, where freed slaves went to Afrika to found a nation. Eleven percent of the population is descended from American slaves and the official language is English. It has an oddly American atmosphere to it, but when the ex-slaves colonised it there were tribes already there and were enslaved by the ex-slaves and not considered citizens of the country. Sierra Leone, next door, was also founded by former slaves, this time loyalists who fought on the British side in the American War of Independence and ended up in Nova Scotia and also some Black Londoners who were resettled. There was also Sengbe Pieh, who was the leader of the only successful slave rebellion on a ship which resulted in a court case in the US and their return to Afrika. Hence both of these countries have a peculiar relationship with the West and the US compared to other Afrikan nations. The Vai syllabary was in use by 1833, and prior to that a number of Cherokee had emigrated to Liberia, one of whom, Austin Curtis, had married into a Vai family and become a chief, so it’s possible that the inspiration is Cherokee. Vai was actually first used by Momolu Duwalu Bukele, but he claimed that he received it in a vision, and this is where things get a bit confusing.
There are many claims that different West Afrikan scripts, of which there are a couple of dozen, were received by divine revelation or a vision, but also there are claims that many of them have been found to have ancient origins long before they were used by their apparent inventors, and it isn’t clear whether the scripts are ancient, invented consciously or received in visions. This makes their origins obscure. It’s also notable that there’s a remarkably large number of them. It’s also probable that there was a strong motivation for indigenous West Afrikan scripts to be promoted in order to refute the idea that Black people were inferior, either by inventing the writing themselves in response to this or as discoveries of ancient scripts to demonstrate that ancient Afrikans south of the Sahara were not illiterate. Having said that, I don’t consider it problematic that a script could appear fully-formed in someone’s mind because the same kind of thing happens to me in other situations, and I don’t think I’m unusual in that respect. Vai script was also alleged to have been secret and Bukele may have invented the dream explanation as a cover story. It was apparently used by Afrikan slaves in Suriname before it was supposèdly invented or revealed to Bukele. Then again, the writing in Suriname is said to be due to spirit possession. The whole thing is very confusing, at least to an outsider. All of this is very interesting, but it means that the scripts need to be considered in their own right rather than in terms of their origin in order not to lead to confusion. That said, there are a number of scripts in England which are said to have resulted from the same phenomenon such as Celestial and Enochian.
One of the most striking scripts is illustrated at the top of this post: Benin-Edo. Edo was the main language of the Benin Empire in what is now southern Nigeria, founded in 1180 CE. I haven’t yet been able to find out much about it but it doesn’t appear to be ancient. It existed by 1999 CE though.
An incomplete list of West Afrikan scripts includes: Yorùbá Holy Script, Bassa, N’Ko, Nisbidi, Mende, Bamun, Kukakui and Shumom. One of the issues with writing these languages in the Latin alphabet is that the systems so far invented for them, which I would guess were invented by Christian missionaries, don’t do justice to their phonology. Although there are several widely-spoken and major exceptions to this tendency, most languages which originated in Afrika south of the Sahara are tonal, and this is often not well-represented in the Latin scripts. Moreover, there are a number of sounds in West Afrikan languages, such as the double-articulated “gb” and “kp” and the prenasalised stops such as “ngk” and “mb” (my representation, not part of the actual spelling) which are contrasted with the actual consonant clusters forming completely different words. That is, there can be an N followed by a D or an “ND” sound, and they’re two different things. Syllables represented by vowels can also be poorly represented. Hence there are a number of factors involved in the use of widely varying scripts in West Afrika. I also wonder whether they constitute an important part of the tribes’ identity, and this brings me to South Asia.
The South Asian scripts are all descended from Brahmi. In Northern India and Nepal, these scripts are often characterised by a horizontal line joining the letters or characters in a word together. This is because they were originally written on palm leaves and the line is a vein in the monocotyledonous leaf with its parallel venation. In South India and elsewhere, and in a few scripts in North India, the characters are discrete, being neither cursive nor joined by the line. South Asian scripts are abugidas. Each consonantal character includes an intrinsic vowel, often schwa but sometimes, as with Bengali, a short O, which has to be specifically shown not to be present with a cancelling sign or a vowel modifying the letter placed to the left, right, above or below the consonant. Some also have conjunct consonants, which mix two or three letters together. Gurumukhi, used to write Punjabi, uses a line but lacks conjunct consonants and is particularly clearly written. Gujurati is one exception to the use of the line in a North Indian language, and uses separate characters without an associated line. In South India the letters are always separated. The scrpts extended well beyond India and were modified. Particularly notable is ‘Phags Pa, used to write Tibetan, which although it’s written left to right horizontally like the others, also tends to pile letters up vertically, and is far from being phonetic. Southeast Asia, with the exception of Vietnam, uses Brahmi-derived scripts as well, including the apparently longest alphabet of all, Khmer, used to write Cambodian with sixty-three letters, although this claim seems to have been rescinded as there are now said to be only thirty-three. Khmer uses a lot of letters with the same sound because they were used in Sanskrit and have fallen together.
The situation in South Asia, particularly India, seems to be that every language deserves its own script, which again I would attribute to some kind of identity politics. Not all South Asian languages have a long literary tradition. For instance, Burushaski, a language isolate spoken in Pakistan, may have had a written form which died out, and is written in both Latin and Arabic. Ol Cemet’ is an alphabet as opposed to an abugida or abjad (Arabic and Hebrew) invented in 1925, and is used to write Santali, a Munda language.
This isn’t intended to be an exhaustive survey of the writing systems of the world so much as a sketch of the situation. It seems to obey some kind of 80:20-like distribution and resembles the distribution of languages, although not in the same areas. Most of the Islamic world uses Arabic, most of the Russian- and Slavic-influenced world Cyrillic, and South Asia has a plethora of scripts of its own. East Asia has a number of Chinese-influenced scripts with the exception of Hangul which is logically organised as opposed to having evolved without conscious influence. West Afrika in particular has a large number of scripts due to a variety of factors. The Americas have had scripts which are now extinct and are now dominated by Latin, but also have some non-Latin scripts which were consciously designed. Finally, most of Europe, Afrika and Oceania use the Latin script, though Arabic and Tifinagh are used in North Afrika and the first was historically used further south. The usual 80:20 type rule can be applied to this, where the majority of languages use a small number of scripts but a fair proportion also have their own, but it’s notable that outside South Asia, which has both a large number of languages and a large number of scripts, often one per language, most scripts are only used by one or two languages, and they do not correspond to areas of great linguistic diversity. It’s also clearly a lot easier for a constructed script to be adopted than a constructed language such as Esperanto.
Many people call them biros and a few of them call them ballpoint pens, which is what they’re actually called. Nowadays of course, they’re just called pens on the whole, because they’re almost the only kind of pen in existence and writing implements as such are becoming rarer. I haven’t observed the general public or the younger generation enough to know, but I wouldn’t be surprised if people tend to jot down notes on their ‘phones nowadays rather than using an actual pen or pencil, so the scope for referring to writing implements is probably quite small.
Today the bic is celebrated, apparently, as in 10th June. It was invented in 1943 by a Hungarian called László József Bíró, which is during the Second World War and makes me feel somewhat disturbed considering what was going on in Hungary at the time. Apparently he fled the Nazis to Argentina, which again seems an odd place to go for someone trying to get away from them, but maybe my grasp of mid-twentieth century geopolitics is weak. In any case, Biró was a newspaper editor who had noticed that newsprint dried very quickly and wanted to find a way to use it in a pen, which was unfeasible with a conventional fountain pen. He wasn’t the first person to try to devise a ballpoint pen. It had been tried in the nineteenth century and the result was a crude, wide-nibbed device sufficient to mark surfaces such as writing a single character on a leather strap or something, but not suitable for the likes of sustained continuous writing. The hurdles were the viscosity of the ink and the size of the ball relative to the socket. If the ink was too viscous, it just wouldn’t emerge from the nib, and if it was too think it would leak, and similar limitations beset the size of the ball. Thus it took a long time for the bic to be invented even though the idea was around for decades before anyone actually managed to do it.
Fountain pens were perceived to be inefficient because they were less flexible and tended to be quite time-consuming. Fountain pen ink takes a long time to dry, the surfaces on which they write need to be quite smooth, but not too smooth and have the right degree of absorbency, and if they’re dip pens they run out of ink fast and need replenishing. Also, you really need to be sitting at a desk and holding them at the right angle to use them properly. However, they have an interesting history of their own. They were one of the first items to be mass produced, and there was a problem with water-based ink causing them to corrode early on. They only replaced quills in the nineteenth century in North America. I’ve made and used quills myself, but since this activity post-dates my going vegan I used feathers which had already been shed. It’s easy to make a quill and it won’t surprise you to hear that pen knives are involved in making them. You are supposed to strip off the barbs though. It’s a little like cutting your nails. I tended to use Chinese stick ink, which is made from rain water and soot, although you can also use tannins, traditionally from oak galls, and gum, in my case usually from mallow since many plants in the Malvaceæ are mucilaginous. Another traditional ink recipe is high in green vitriol or copperas, ferrous sulphate. I understood it to be poisonous for this reason but apparently copperas is routinely used as an iron supplement so, rather embarrassingly, I was wrong about a major medical issue. One thing which definitely is true is that because tannins are acidic, ink can eat through the medium it’s applied to after a few centuries, leaving holes where the writing used to be.
Before quills, and in other parts of the world, reeds were used for pens, usually carved in the same way, including bamboo stalks. These are actually easier to make because they don’t need to be prepared in advance like feathers, and they’re more directly vegan, but they tend to be larger than quills and consequently the writing is too. Although parchment and vellum, both animal products, were the main media in the Middle Ages, paper has existed since Ancient Egyptian times and was invented independently in Mesoamerica. I have made paper myself from grass clippings, but it basically looked like cowpats, although it was possible to write on it. In fact, sufficiently well-rinsed large herbivorous mammal droppings would often work really well as paper, and elephant poo is used for that purpose. Hence even in a pre-industrial society there isn’t really any reason not to use vegan writing materials.
My Own History With Writing
I offer myself as a typical Northwest European born at the end of the mid-twentieth century of the Common Era regarding my history with writing, although there are many ways in which I’m definitely not typical. The use of bics is involved, so I haven’t veered so far off topic. The thing to bear in mind which makes me a lot less typical is that I used to have something like pica and I’m apparently dyspraxic, although that’s never been diagnosed.
I’ll cover the pica first, which it may not be. I used to eat pencils. No, I don’t mean chew them, I mean literally eat them. Back in the early 1970s, most pencils were made of cedarwood rather than jelutong as they are today, and consequently they smelt quite nice and were appetising. It was fun to fray their ends so as to produce a spray of brush-like fibres, the flakes of possibly lead-based paint have a nice texture and the graphite can be ground down to quite a creamy texture. I still appreciate the appeal of pencils. Cedar also has an appealing flavour. One drawback was that I used to get splinters in my mouth. At primary school, I used to eat through my quota of pencils and the school had to introduce a new rule that each pupil would only be issued with one per term. If you nibble along the side of a pencil, it’s possible to split it in half and take the lead out, then stick it back together again fairly convincingly. I used to do this and claim to my teacher that I’d broken the point, but it was not a successful ruse. After I stopped eating pencils, I started to chew on the sides of desk lids, which was also frowned upon.
So the question arises, was that pica? Pica is sometimes a symptom of mineral deficiency, but usually isn’t. However, I was anæmic at the time and iron deficiency is one of the causes, so the chances are this was a contributory factor in my case. That said, there is an association with OCD. To this day, although I am intellectually aware that it’s inadvisable and that most people don’t do it, it really doesn’t seem that strange to eat pencils, although I haven’t done so for over four decades now. I also used to eat grass, by which I don’t mean the usual sucking at a grass stalk, although I also did that, but actually munch down large quantities of the stuff. That also used to cut my mouth up a bit. It might’ve made more sense to drink ink, although by then it was probably devoid of green vitriol.
Once I’d stopped eating them, I became very attached to pencils. I used to take a pencil to bed with me every night along with a tiny model of a woman from the back of a toy elephant. Since one of their predecessors was a golly, I consider this progress. I continued to write mainly with a pencil up until I was sixteen. As time went by, the lead I used got harder and harder and I came to despise softer black leads such as B and only used 4H and 5H, on the assumption that they went further.
In the meantime, I learnt to print letters with a pencil. My early writing gives a rather surreal impression, since it’s a childish hand but consists substantially of chemical and mathematical formulæ and the like. Some of it’s in Greek, again printed rather than cursive. Most of my capital letters are the same in form today as they were when I learnt to form them back in ’72, but I used to write mainly in lower case, including chemical symbols. In the early days of my primary education, the Initial Teaching Alphabet was still in use in some places and the captions used in some educational TV programmes aimed at primary school children were printed both in Latin and ITA script. The latter fascinated me, but since at the time it was blamed for causing mass illiteracy. The problem with the ITA, which incidentally is still supported by a vanishingly small minority, was that it required children to learn to read twice, first using the ITA and later in Latin script. I would also imagine it was annoying to have your reading matter limited to what was deemed acceptable as teaching materials, which would seem to miss out all the other opportunities for learning to read in the outside world such as social sight reading. I’ve never been able to work out whether the band Slade’s spelling was connected to some general thrust towards spelling reform which also included the ITA.
Like many other children of my age in English state schools, I came to learn cursive via Marion Richardson. She was an educator who lived from 1892-1946 and participated mainly in child-centred art education, but also produced a model of cursive handwriting which became the standard form of cursive for English, possibly British, children in the post-war period, and possibly before. It looks like this:
Considering that this is the cursive of at least fifty million people, I consider it silly to attribute intellectual property to this image.
The capitals are often not like mine and they have a kind of inter-war air to them. My “G” used to be more elaborate, I have a horizontal top on my “J”, there’s no stem on my “U”, the centre of the “W” goes up to the top, the “Y” has a horizontal descender and the “Q” has a stalk which crosses the circle. Later on, I also started to cross my zeds, but not when I learnt to write. As for lower case, I found myself completely incapable of writing, and it became so illegible that I was told to go back to printing. I then changed schools and proceeded to learn the italic cursive taught at the second primary school, managing perfectly well.
In order to learn cursive, I had to use a fountain pen. I would usually break the nibs inadvertantly shortly after using them because I pressed too hard. This is an example of how graphology is surely valid in some respects, because I think it reflected my frustration. I also used to break pencils inadvertantly for the same reason. The problem with the nibs was that they used to split sideways along the fissure meant to ferry ink to paper. At the second school, I began to use an italic nib, which is wider, and found once again that the pens used to break, though to this day I don’t know why because they weren’t damaged by pressure.
My current style of handwriting owes itself to a comment made by one of my friends at the second primary school which turned out to be false, though probably just a rumour which got out of hand. I was told that the secondary school I was to attend wouldn’t allow pupils to use italic script, so that July I worked on rounding off my italic script, resulting in an idiosyncratic but clearly legible style. However, I needn’t have bothered. When I actually got to the school, their signs were actually written calligraphically in Foundation Hand and one teacher actually heaped praise on one pupil who used italic, so all of that was completely pointless. In the meantime I ended up with very untidy handwriting, because I’d effectively only learnt cursive a few weeks before I started, and I still couldn’t use the compulsory fountain pen for the reasons I’ve described above. This was one of several factors which led to my work giving a very poor impression. Teachers used to say that the content might be really good but they couldn’t tell because it was illegible.
There was a knock-on effect from figures to letters which finished when I was about eleven, related to maths teaching. I’ve always written my 1’s in the continental style with a long diagonal at the top, which also led to me crossing my 7’s. When a maths teacher pointed out that he couldn’t tell my 2’s from my Z’s, I also began to cross those. Early on in secondary school, I also learnt Cyrillic cursive, which led to the ability to use copperplate script for Latin if I so chose. I’d also known the Hebrew script for some time by then, but didn’t use the cursive version, which I still find illegible.
By the time I was twelve, I had to make two further changes. My English teacher, who was partially-sighted, insisted on everyone using black ink, which I have ever since, and also advised me to use Pentel pens rather than fountain even though they were officially forbidden, and that did lead to some improvement in my handwriting.
Why am I going into so much apparently egoistic detail here about such an apparently boring subject?
The point of this narrative is to emphasise the problem school approaches to pupils’ behaviour can be. I don’t want to dilate too much on this issue because I have in theory an entire blog devoted to the issue of schooling and associated matters, but insisting on children doing things in a particular way lead to numerous disadvantages to many of them. I prefer fountain pens to bics for ecological reasons, but recognise their potentially disabling influence. The use of the ITA, aside from its other problems, also tended to contain children’s reading to material which had been officially deemed acceptable to them, such as ‘Peter And Jane’ books with their certain social attitudes, and confines reading to “that thing we do in school”.
Cursive And Non-Cursive Scripts
Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Cyrillic all have printed and cursive versions. In published books, newspapers and usually on signs, discrete characters are used. When written by hand with pen or pencil, adults other than learners generally use cursive. It may be connected to my own familiarity, or the nature of the cursive itself. Cyrillic written untidily is notoriously hard to read and several of its letters and sections of letters are effectively identical. It’s widely acknowledged as not being ideal, but if it’s written neatly it’s another matter entirely. Hebrew just seems perverse. Several of its letters seem to bear no resemblance at all to their printed form. Greek cursive is easy.
Some other scripts, notably Arabic, are purely cursive, even when printed. There was no point, as far as I know, since Muħammad’s time, that it was ever written with purely discrete letters. Studies of eye movements when reading Arabic script show the reader lingering for longer over each letter, or letter plus other sign combination, than with a script such as Hebrew or Greek. It’s interesting to compare Hebrew cursive with Arabic because the two are closely related and use the same kind of principles in distinguishing between letters and representing vowels. Nonetheless, even cursive Hebrew isn’t much like Arabic. I’m aware that an Urdu newspaper used to be painstakingly written out by hand before being printed, and I presume this was the general approach with Arabic script. Urdu, incidentally, uses a different calligraphic style than is standard for Arabic. There is no non-cursive Arabic calligraphy either.
As far as I know, no script was originally cursive, but this is misleading because most scripts in use today have a common origin via Phœnician, which was not. Completely independent scripts do exist, and the only one I can think of which might be thought of as originally cursive is Mayan, which joins its glyphs together in blocks. Arabic is descended, along with many other forms of writing, from the cursive Syriac, which also gave rise to the vertically written Sogdian and Classical Mongolian. Latin took a long time to take up a cursive form. The Romans themselves never wrote it that way, and in the Dark Ages it continued to have unconnected letters. It wasn’t until fairly late in the European Middle Ages that it began to be written in this way, and this raises a question. Why did Latin script not evolve into a completely cursive script before the introduction of printing? Why are we reading books and display screens which continue to have separate characters on the whole? There are various ligatures in print such as ß, “fl” and the “ct” ligature which does not exist in Unicode, and there are medial and final forms of S, which coincidentally also apply to the Greek lowercase sigma, but movable type only became practicable because Latin tends not to do this. However, that’s a Whiggish approach, and there was no reason to suppose people in Western Europe were thinking, “oh, we’d better be careful with how we write in case we invent the printing press one day”.
The idea of discrete phonemic characters ultimately influenced the computerisation of text. It turned out to be a lot more difficult to digitise Chinese, Japanese and Arabic script than Latin, or for that matter Cyrillic and Greek. Hebrew is fairly straightforward except for niqqud, dagesh and existence of final forms of some consonants. Harking back to this post, I managed to do it on a Jupiter Ace, and there used to be an Arabic ROM for the ZX81. It’s also been noted that Indian and Greek philosophers came up with the idea of atomism but Chinese didn’t, and this has been attributed to the first two having alphabetic scripts (technically Brahmi and its descendants are abugidas) and the Chinese not. The word elementum originally meant letter and is actually similar to “alphabet” as “LMN”, and has been attributed to Etruscan but there seems no good reason to suppose this.
It’s only fair now to mention other writing systems. Chinese hanzi are of two forms: traditional and simplified. I’m more familiar with the traditional, and prefer it because the characters look more like what they mean. The Chinese invented movable type and printed on paper long before the West, and the technology of papermaking reached the West via the Arab world. Japanese calligraphy is somewhat different from Chinese as it’s influenced by Zen and attempts to make the strokes flow together. Japanese, of course, uses several different scripts in combination, three of which are derived from hanzi, but the chief interest here is that it approaches cursive more closely than Chinese. Korean I’ve mentioned before, and consists of stylised diagrams of the speech organs. In Afrika, various writing systems exist, both constructed and traditional, and for a long time Arabic was used for many of the languages. I’ve mentioned these before. As far as I know, only Arabic is cursive.
Speed, Efficiency and Legibility
It’s been said (and no, I have no source for this) that Latin handwriting goes through a two century cycle of speed versus legibility. This appears to be so from what I’ve seen, but I might be imposing my pre-conceptions on it. It should also be borne in mind that not all handwriting is directly from Latin script because many countries used to use Black Letter. 𝔗𝔥𝔦𝔰 𝔦𝔰 𝔉𝔯𝔞𝔨𝔱𝔲𝔯, 𝔬𝔫𝔢 𝔳𝔞𝔯𝔦𝔢𝔱𝔶 𝔬𝔣 𝔅𝔩𝔞𝔠𝔨 𝔏𝔢𝔱𝔱𝔢𝔯 (𝔰𝔬 𝔠𝔞𝔩𝔩𝔢𝔡 “𝔊𝔬𝔱𝔥𝔦𝔠”) 𝔰𝔠𝔯𝔦𝔭𝔱. Handwriting based on this script can be difficult to read if you’re used to the English-speaking cursive forms, but it influences much of Northern Europe, and again that could’ve been us. The original invention of Black Letter seems to have been partly motivated by a desire to save on expensive parchment or vellum, as it tends to be very narrow, but its similarity to Perpendicular architecture and possibly also the costumes of the time is notable. A later development which has always puzzled me is the apparent attempt to save paper by writing on a sheet twice, the second time at right angles to the first. For this to be legible, there need to be big gaps between the lines and the ascenders and descenders have to be much larger than the middle zones of the letters, which makes the writing itself quite inefficient, and it seems to make more sense to compress the letters à la Gothic. Abbreviations are also common in older texts, some of which I’ve adopted myself in the interests of efficiency.
There’s an odd discrepancy between what Sarada and I find legible. Publishers expect double spaced manuscripts so as to make notes and corrections between the lines and she always types in this way. I find it tiring and difficult to read a double-spaced text and tend to start to read each line a second time due to the space I have to traverse to continue reading. Obviously if this is printed out it uses more paper, although it may be necessary to do this. I also write all the way up to the upper and lower edges of a page, which I think is unusual, and don’t use margins. Psychologically I would connect this to my preference for “black drinks” like coffee and Barleycup as opposed to infusions and solid food as opposed to soup or other watery food! Consequently my writing has tended to attempt to pack as much information as possible into as small a space as possible, and I noted that my note form is actually more efficient than most shorthand. Speaking of which, Pitman shorthand is impossible for me to use as it involves varying pressure, but is a further example of a cursive script, as are Gregg and Teeline. I imagine all of these are nearly extinct now. Isaac Pitman, who invented Pitman shorthand in the nineteenth century, was also the grandfather of James Pitman who invented the ITA in the 1960s.
My note form is not legible, but it doesn’t need to be. The benefit of shorthand systems is that they can be read by others, but in order to facilitate that they seem to compromise on brevity. They are of course mainly cursive, but apparently studies have shown that a mixture of cursive and print, i.e. not dogmatically insisting that the pen never leave the paper within a word except to add diacritics or cross T’s, can be writtern faster than pure cursive, and my own writing is mixed. In fact I only started to dot my I’s and cross my T’s recently, as it felt uncomfortable to leave unfinished letters in the middle of a word I was writing and it also involves going back on yourself, something I dislike intensely.
Disability And Sustainability
There has recently been controversy over the issue of plastic straws, as many disabled people find hard, non-disposable straws difficult or impossible to use, so a complete ban has ableist overtones. It should also be put in context of most plastic waste and pollution emanating from items not used by the end consumer, and there are also issues of inappropriate use of non-plastic materials. The same kind of thing applies to writing implements. Fountain pens, particularly dip pens, are paragons of virtue in this respect. They go on forever and are even handed down as heirlooms, and this in in general how things should be. That said, not only is a fountain pen in my hand not going to be handed down to anyone because I will end up breaking it, but also my school’s insistence on using them as opposed to ballpoint pens damaged my reputation early in life and made it harder to communicate with teachers. Breaking free of that by using Pentels made a big difference to my education in the long run, and I feel this is quite similar to the sustainability issue with straws. I shudder to think how many bics I’ve got through which are now lying in landfill somewhere, but fountain pens are largely unusable to me. Ironically, their predecessors, reed and quill pens, are actually a lot easier to use, though not so much as ballpoints.
I don’t know if children in the developed world still learn to write Latin script cursively. I can imagine some conservative viewpoint wishing to adhere to this for no good reason but rationalising it with post hoc claims of correlation between violent crime and the abandonment of cursive writing in state schools, but I think we all probably know that it doesn’t really matter. What may matter, however, is that we have replaced pens with less sustainable systems such as mobile digital electronics, and that we could become dependent upon them. We don’t know how long we can do this and it also leaves us beholden to large corporations and their ethical issues. It also leaves us vulnerable to the likes of the Carrington Event, which I will talk about tomorrow.
Some time ago in the 1980s I think, I made one of my many attempts to learn Gàidhlig and noticed something rather strange. I already had some knowledge of Hebrew and Arabic from when I was younger, and it suddenly struck me that the Celtic language shared some remarkable unusual features with the other two. From what I can recall, these included verb-subject-object word order, two genders – feminine and masculine – and something I can only vaguely remember about how prepositions and pronouns work. At the time, I didn’t know what to make of it. It seemed to be more than a coincidence because three always counts to my mind as more than chance allows, but it was difficult to think of a way of how it could’ve happened. I eventually settled on a rather vague conclusion that maybe Semitic language speakers had travelled north from the Maghreb into Iberia, which Q-Celtic languages are sometimes claimed to originate, and that they then influenced the ancestor of the Irish language in some way. However, this doesn’t work particularly well as it fails to explain how Welsh and Cornish also have these features. After a while, I just put it down to coincidence and my tendency to see patterns where none exist other than the ones my mind has imposed upon them.
At this point I’m going to veer off into probability to illustrate why three things in common is my threshold for statistical significance. It’s common to plump for one in twenty as the point at which something is considered significant, and scientific experiments often use this. In recent years I’ve seen rather too many dubious-looking scientific papers which seem to go for a much lower limit and I now wonder if there has been a new development in statistical theory which justifies this, or whether it’s more to do with “publish or perish”. Anyway, probabilities multiply, so if you flip a fair coin three times and it comes up heads every time the probability of that outcome is one in two times one in two times one in two. 2³ is eight, still below the point when one decides something is significant, but the probability of something happening is not always one in two. For fair dice, you’d only need to throw a six twice for it to become significant: one in thirty-six is six squared. Taking this the other way, the mean probability for three events to multiply up to one in twenty is of course the cube root of twenty, which is just over one in 2.7. However, this reasoning is faulty because we see patterns as opposed to the absence of patterns, so given the large number of other grammatical features one could pluck out of Celtic and Semitic languages, the ones that don’t fit might be ignored and the calculation then becomes extremely complicated because one then has to consider how to delineate specific grammatical features and how to count them, then work out what the chances are that two sets of languages share three grammatical features based on this and the number of possible options. For instance, with syntax the options, assuming a largely fixed word order which doesn’t always happen, are SVO, SOV, OVS, VSO, VOS and OSV, which is one in six. However, other features are quite arbitrary. There are languages out there with more than two dozen grammatical genders, for example. It’s possible to imagine a language whose every noun has a different gender.
Another pattern which definitely is meaningful which can be plucked out of Celtic languages as they are today is the fact that they and Romance languages, more specifically Italic languages, which are Romance languages plus Latin and its closest contemporary relatives, are closer to one another than they are to other branches of the Indo-European language family. Some of these features are the result of parallel evolution. For instance, all of the surviving six Celtic languages have two grammatical genders consisting of feminine and masculine, and this is also true of all Western Romance languages (though not of Romanian, which still has neuter). Besides this, other Indo-European languages tend to use an ending like “-est” to express the superlative of adjectives, but Italic and Celtic tend to use something like “-issimum” – “best” versus “bellissimo” for example. There are a number of other similarities which may be preserved ancient features lost from the other languages, features acquired because they were neighbours or features acquired in their common ancestral language. These are, though, easy to account for because Italic and Celtic just are obviously related, were spoken near each other and so on. The idea of a parallel between Celtic and Semitic is much harder to explain, which is why it might not exist at all.
Recently, I discovered that my personal will o’ the wisp is not in fact just mine. Professional linguists have noticed this too, and there are even theories about how it might have happened and a number of other features in common. VSO and inflected prepositions are just two of several parallels. I should explain that in Gàidhlig and its relatives, prepositions vary according to who they refer to, so for example “agam” means “at me” and “agat” “at thee”. The origin of these is easy to account for, that the words have simply been run together over the millennia, but few other languages do this. Arabic and Hebrew, on the other hand, do. The languages also do things with these prepositions which other languages don’t. They express possession and obligation with them. “The hair on her” – “am falt oirre” is “her hair” and “I need/want/must have a knife” is “tha bhuam sgian” – “there is from me (a) knife”. That “(a)” indicates something else they have in common: they all have a word for “the” but none for “a”. It’s unusual for a language to have a way of expressing definiteness without indefiniteness. Interestingly, Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse, both spoken in these isles, also had a way to say “the” but not one to say “a(n)”, and this may be a clue as to how these apparent coincidences happened. Breton, however, does have an indefinite article. Likewise, all the languages repeat the pronoun at the end of a relative clause – “the chair which I sat on it” and not “the chair (which) I sat on”. There’s also the way the word for “and” is used, or rather, a word for “and”: “agus” in Gàidhlig (there’s another word, “is”) and “wa” in Arabic (“ve” in today’s Hebrew). In English, “and” is a simple coördinating conjunction like “or” and “but”, but in the other languages it can also be used as a subordinating one. It can also mean “when” or “as”. This is also unusual. “Agus”/”ve” can also be used to mean “but” or “although”, and in fact as I understand it, the Arabic “wa” is the only option to express “but”. Besides this, there’s what’s known as the construct state genitive in English descriptions of Hebrew grammar. Arabic doesn’t say “the man’s house” but “man the house”, or “taigh an duine” in Gàidhlig – “the house man”. This is in spite of the fact that the language in question has a genitive form for the noun in question. This makes approximately eight features found in Celtic and Semitic languages but only rarely in others.
And there’s more. The surviving Celtic languages are unusual among Indo-European languages in having these features, and are in general quite aberrant compared to the others. That said, there are branches of the family which have unusual features for it, such as Armenian, which has grammar more like other languages than Indo-European in that it hangs successive suffixes off the ends of words per idea as opposed to having combined ideas in each suffix (in English we have, for example, a final S for genitive (possessive) and plural and don’t need anything extra). Even so, were it not for the known history and the fact that so much Celtic vocabulary is clearly similar to that of other European languages, nobody would guess Celtic languages were Indo-European. In fact, the very features which they share with Semitic languages are the ones which make them unique in the Indo-European family.
They are also emphatically not related to each other, or at least so distantly related that there are languages native to Kenya and Tanzania which are closer to Hebrew and Arabic and a dead language spoken in present day China which is closer to Welsh (and in fact English) than they are to each other. Semitic languages are part of a family now referred to as “Afro-Asiatic”, which also includes Tamazight, a Berber language, and Ancient Egyptian, spoken five thousand years ago and still nowhere near the speech of the Kurgans at the time which are ancestral to Celtic, Germanic and the like. There are, however, a few theories about how this has happened.
One apparently anomalous circumstance which can be seen from the New Testament is that Paul wrote a letter to the Galatians. These lived in Anatolia, the Asian portion of present-day Turkey, and they spoke a Celtic language. This language was clearly in close proximity to the Semitic lingua franca of that region at the time, Aramaic, as well as various others such as Assyrian. It’s therefore been suggested that the whole of the Celtic branch was influenced by this local connection, all the way across to Ireland in the end. To me, this seems a little far-fetched, but it is true that there’s a concentration of a particular set of genes which marks the Irish, and incidentally myself, as possible wanderers from the Indo-European ancestral land who went as far as possible at the time. This may make the so-called Celts the ultimate invaders in a way and contradicts the common mystical, matriarchal and peaceful image some people seem to have of them. This migration also forms part of another theory, that farming, having been invented in the Fertile Crescent where Semitic languages were spoken, then spread culturally across Europe to these islands and took linguistic features with it. Either of these ideas being true could be expected to imply that all Celtic languages, not just the modern survivors here and in Brittany, had these features in common.
Significantly, the speakers of Celtic languages were probably the first Indo-European speakers to arrive in Great Britain and Ireland. Prior to that, clearly there were other people living here who had their own spoken but unwritten languages. It’s possible that traces of these may survive in place names. It used to be thought that the Picts spoke a non-IE language, possibly related to Basque, but this has now been refuted. The features Irish, Welsh and the rest have in common with Hebrew and Arabic are also apparently shared with Tamazight and other languages of the Maghreb, although to me that’s hearsay – I haven’t checked them out. Consequently, one rather outré theory, is that before the Celts got here the folk of Albion and the Emerald Isle spoke a Semitic language, and Celtic was influenced by this when it got here. However, there doesn’t seem to be much reason to suppose this to be so other than the connection.
Leaving those theories aside, I would bring up the issue of linguistic universals, and particularly implicational universals. Some features are common to all spoken languages. For example, every known spoken language has a vowel like /a/ as in “father” in it, every language which distinguishes questions tonally involves changing the pitch of the voice towards the end of the sentence, and every language has at least some plural pronouns. There’s a particular set of implicational universals around SOV languages which they tend to have in common, such as being exclusively suffixing, to the extent that it used to be thought that there was a so-called “Altaic” language family including Turkish and Mongolian, and some would even include Japanese and Korean in that, but they’ve turned out not to be closely related but have sometimes grown more alike through contact, but they also have many of these implicational universals, suggesting to me some kind of possible “standard” human spoken language with those grammatical features. I would tentatively suggest, and I may well be wrong, that the features Celtic and Semitic languages share are in fact similarly implicational universals. Both of them have an unusual syntax and this may lead them both down the same path.
But there’s an extra layer to this which intrigues me. There used to be a famous Hebrew teacher who introduced the subject as “Gentlemen, this is the language God spoke” (yes, this is extremely sexist but it was a long time ago), and similarly Arabic is considered a particularly sacred language almost designed by God to write the Qur’an. Hence the features mentioned are used in two very important sacred texts, and if I’m going to go all religious and mystical on you, just maybe the Celtic and Semitic languages have a special place in spiritual practices, and this is about that. But leaving that aside, it still seems to me that the most likely explanation for the things they have in common is simply that they are a particular “type” of language, just as Japanese and Turkish are, without needing to have any genetic relationship.
They’re also both really annoying!
The issue of overinterpretation will have to be held over until tomorrow, sorry.
A Box Of Chocolates 